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I also take the view that it's a mistake to try to look younger than one is, and that the face in particular ought to be the register of a properly lived life. I don't want to look as if I have been piloting the Concorde without a windshield, and I can't imagine whom I would be fooling if I did.

– Christopher Hitchens

More thoughts from Hitchens on his trip to the spa in Vanity Fair

Thanks, Google!

You may not have been aware of it, but Google has entered into the directory assistance business, and, at least for now, the consumer benefits.

Directory assistance has always wanted to be free. Since it launched six months ago, Google's foray into phone-based information has become the easiest, quickest, most efficient free 411 I've used. I'm amazed more people don't have it programmed into their phones. Best part: there are no pre-roll ads. Another well-known option is 1-800-FREE411, but it can take 20 seconds before the "What city and state?" finally arrives. With GOOG-411, the same prompt is delivered in 4 seconds. Time is precious, but even more so if you're on a conservative plan with limited minutes. For that same reason (read: frugality), I'm less inclined to use SMS-based 411 or Google SMS. GOOG-411 also connects your call to the business for free, so there's no need to jot down or memorize any digits. Dialing "411" and paying $2 is like flipping through one of Ma Bell's analog phone books when you've got a connected laptop right in front of you -- an easily-remedied symptom of a bygone era.

1-800-GOOG-411

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

– Sigmund Freud

Tip of the Iceberg?

Satyajit Das is laughing. It appears I have said something very funny, but I have no idea what it was. My only clue is that the laugh sounds somewhat pitying.

One of the world's leading experts on credit derivatives (financial instruments that transfer credit risk from one party to another), Das is the author of a 4,200-page reference work on the subject, among a half-dozen other tomes. As a developer and marketer of the exotic instruments himself over the past 30 years, he seemed like the ideal industry insider to help us get to the bottom of the recent debt crunch -- and I expected him to defend and explain the practice.

I started by asking the Calcutta-born Australian whether the credit crisis was in what Americans would call the "third inning." This was pretty amusing, it seemed, judging from the laughter. So I tried again. "Second inning?" More laughter. "First?" Still too optimistic.

Das, who knows as much about global money flows as anyone in the world, stopped chuckling long enough to suggest that we're actually still in the middle of the national anthem before a game destined to go into extra innings. And it won't end well for the global economy.

Ursa Major

Das is pretty droll for a math whiz, but his message is dead serious. He thinks we're on the verge of a bear market of epic proportions.
The cause: Massive levels of debt underlying the world economic system are about to unwind in a profound and persistent way.
He's not sure if it will play out like the 13-year decline of 90% in Japan from 1990 to 2003 that followed the bursting of a credit bubble there, or like the 15-year flat spot in the U.S. market from 1960 to 1975. But either way, he foresees hard times as an optimistic era of too much liquidity, too much leverage and too much financial engineering slowly and inevitably deflates.

Like an ex-mobster turning state's witness, Das has turned his back on his old pals in the derivatives biz to warn anyone who will listen -- mostly banks and hedge funds that pay him consulting fees -- that the jig is up.

Rather than joining the crowd that blames the mess on American slobs who took on more mortgage debt than they could afford and have endangered the world by stiffing lenders, he points a finger at three parties: regulators who stood by as U.S. banks developed ingenious but dangerous ways of shifting trillions of dollars of credit risk off their balance sheets and into the hands of unsophisticated foreign investors, hedge and pension fund managers who gorged on high-yield debt instruments they didn't understand and financial engineers who built towers of "securitized" debt with math models that were fundamentally flawed.
"Defaulting middle-class U.S. homeowners are blamed, but they are merely a pawn in the game," he says. "Those loans were invented so that hedge funds would have high-yield debt to buy."

The Liquidity Factory

Das' view sounds cynical, but it makes sense if you stop thinking about mortgages as a way for people to finance houses and think about them instead as a way for lenders to generate cash flow and to create collateral during an era of a flat interest rate curve.

Although subprime U.S. loans seem like small change in the context of the multitrillion-dollar debt market, it turns out that these high-yield instruments were an important part of the machine that Das calls the global "liquidity factory." Just like a small amount of gasoline can power an entire truck given the right combination of spark plugs, pistons and transmission, subprime loans became the fuel that underlies derivative securities that are many, many times their size.

Here's how it worked: In olden days, like 10 years ago, banks wrote and funded their own loans. In the new game, Das points out, banks "originate" loans, "warehouse" them on their balance sheets for a brief time, then "distribute" them to investors by packaging them into derivatives called collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, and similar instruments. In this scheme, banks don't need to tie up as much capital, so they can put more money out on loan.

The more loans that were sold, the more they could use as collateral for more loans, so credit standards were lowered to get more paper out the door -- a task that was accelerated in recent years via fly-by-night brokers that are now accused of predatory lending practices.
Buyers of these credit risks in CDO form were insurance companies, pension funds and hedge-fund managers from Bonn to Beijing. Because money was readily available at low interest rates in Japan and the U.S., these managers leveraged up their bets by buying the CDOs with borrowed funds.

So if you follow the bouncing ball, borrowed money bought borrowed money. And then because they had the blessing of credit-ratings agencies relying on mathematical models suggesting that they would rarely default, these CDOs were in turn used as collateral to do more borrowing.

In this way, Das points out, credit risk moved from banks, where it was regulated and observable, to places where it was less regulated and difficult to identify.

Read the rest of John D. Markman's piece here

People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully. I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life.

– Author and University of Illinois at Chicago teacher Linda Landis Andrews

George CaRlin

Still has that edge, and still doesn't mince words...

Tornadoes are caused by trailer parks.

– Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin

Like The Moon

Delancyplace is a blogger who consistently publishes interesting excerpts from a wide variety of sources. Here's a good recent example:

In today's excerpt--Sierra Leone, 1993, and twelve-year-old Ishmael Beah, encountering the grotesque sights of civil war for the first time as rebel troops attack near his town of Kabati, tries to think of calming things:

"As we emerged from the bushes, we saw a man run from the driver's seat [of a van] to the sidewalk, where he vomited blood. His arm was bleeding. When he stopped vomiting, he began to cry. It was the first time I had seen a grown man cry like a child, and I felt a sting in my heart. ... He got to his feet and walked toward the van. When he opened the door opposite the driver's, a woman who was leaning against it fell to the ground. Blood was coming out of her ears. People covered the eyes of their children. In the back of the van were three more dead bodies, two girls and a boy, and their blood was all over the seats and ceiling of the van. ...

"One man carried his dead son. He thought the boy was still alive. The father was covered with his son's blood, and as he ran he kept saying, 'I will get you to the hospital, my boy, and everything will be fine.' ... The last casualty we saw that evening was a woman who carried her baby on her back. Blood was running down her dress and dripping behind her, making a trail. Her child had been shot dead as she ran for her life. Luckily for her, the bullet didn't go through the baby's body. When she stopped at where we stood, she sat on the ground and removed her child. It was a girl, and her eyes were still open, with an interrupted innocent smile on her face. The bullets could be seen sticking out just a little bit in the babies body and she was swelling. The mother clung to her child and rocked her. She was in too much pain and shock to shed tears. ...

"[Later, as we waited], I closed my eyes and the images from Kabati flashed in my mind. I tried to drive them out by evoking older memories of Kabati before the war. ... 'We must strive to be like the moon.' An old man in Kabati repeated this sentence often to people who walked past his house on their way to the river. ... I remember asking my grandmother what the old man meant. She explained that the adage served to remind people to always be on their best behavior and to be good to others. She said that people complain when there is too much sun and it gets unbearably hot, and also when it rains too much or when it gets cold. But, she said, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own way. Children watch their shadows and play in its light, people gather at the square to tell stories and dance through the night. A lot of happy things happen when the moon shines. These are some of the reasons why we should want to be like the moon."

Delancyplace

SONYA: Don't, Boris; sex without love is a meaningless experience.

BORIS: Yes, but as meaningless experiences go, it's one of the best.

– Love and Death, Woody Allen

Flowchart

via The Fishbowl

Forget About Wilt

"One in every 200 men alive today is a relative of Genghis Khan. An international team of geneticists has made the astonishing discovery that more than 16 million men in central Asia have the same male Y chromosome as the great Mongol leader. It is a striking finding: a huge chunk of modern humanity can trace its origins to Khan's vigorous policy of claiming the most beautiful women captured during his merciless conquest.

" 'One thirteenth century Persian historian claimed that within a century of Khan's birth, his enthusiastic mating habits had created a lineage of more than 20,000 individuals,' said team leader Dr Chris Tyler- Smith. 'That now appears to account for around 8% of the men in central Asia.'

"The team, from Britain, Italy, China and Uzbekistan, took tissue samples from 2,000 men from central Asia, and studied each one's Y chromosome, the genetic package that confers maleness and is passed only from father to son. 'Y chromosomes belonging to different men vary slightly. One in every 5,000 DNA units is not the same,' said Tyler- Smith. 'But when we looked at our results, we found a huge group that did not show any differences. We were absolutely amazed.'

Read on at Delancy Place

To insult someone we call him bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, human might be the greater insult

–Isaac Asimov

Excellent Kitty Translation Software

Via Inky Circus

Programming Your Child's Eating Habits

Pregnant mothers-to-be who "eat for two" by increasing their intake of fatty and sugary food could unwittingly be putting their children at risk of obesity, according to new research.

Unborn babies and developing infants can have their eating habits programmed by their mothers' food choices, according to the findings.

Children exposed to "maternal junk food" in the womb or early in life may find it harder to resist an unhealthy diet as they grow older, say the researchers.

Dr Stephanie Bayol, from the Royal Veterinary College in London, said: "Our study has shown that eating large quantities of junk food when pregnant and breastfeeding could impair the normal control of appetite and promote an exacerbated taste for junk food in offspring.

"This could send offspring on the road to obesity and make the task of teaching healthy eating habits in children even more challenging."

Controlling appetite involves hormones which act on the brain to regulate energy balance, hunger and satiety - the sensation of "feeling full".

However, feeding is not merely mechanical. It is partly governed by "reward centres" in the brain whose pleasure responses may override normal "feeling full" signals. Previous research has shown that junk foods rich in fat and sugar inhibit satiety while promoting hunger and stimulating the mind's reward centres.

The new research, carried out on rats, indicates that even before birth, exposure to junk food may induce an unhealthy taste for fatty, sugary treats.

More from the BBC

Enhance Your Ipod Experience

I don't even own an Ipod, but the Phonofone II is way cool!

Through passive amplification alone, These unique pieces instantly transform any personal music player + earbuds into a sculptural audio console.

Without the use of external power or batteries, the Phonofone inventively exploits the virtues of horn acoustics to boost the audio output of standard earphones to up to 55 decibles* (or roughly the maximum volume of laptop speakers)

Upon connecting active earphones to the Phonofone their trebly buzzing is instantly and profoundly transformed into a warm, rich and resonant sound.

Learn more at Science & Sons (via Neatorama)

A Glimpse of Formentera

My father, who came from Europe originally, has travelled back to that continent at least once each year, for as long as I can remember. And while Paris certainly holds a special place in his heart, there is one other location which, for a very long period of time, attracted him on a regular basis: Mallorca.

The best known and largest of the balearic islands, Mallorca has predictably and inexorably changed over the years. My father (and I, at times) used to stay in the charming town of Deya, located on steep hills overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean.

I have vivid memories of the olive and lemon groves, the winding descent to the crystal clear sea, and the fantastic roast chicken served at Jaime's, the local restaurant. My father and I never visited the other balearic islands, but Mrs. Tilton offers an evocative and interesting glimpse of Formentera, the smallest of them, at the group blog Fist Full of Euros. Here's an excerpt:

We’ve just returned from two weeks on Formentera, the smallest and southernmost of the inhabited illes Balears. We try to spend some time on the island at least once every two or three years; for it is an unspoilt place, a place time has left behind, a place untouched by the imperatives of vulgar economics.

No, that’s bollocks, of course. It is no such thing, nor could it be.

Here’s what Formentera really is: an island where, for most of history, people have eked out a living, but only just barely. Then things became easier, in a way that must have struck the islanders as daft in the extreme.

Set down amid turquoise waters of unspeakable beauty, the land has a beauty of its own. But this terrestrial beauty is chaste and arid, and not a little harsh. The fields are dry and stony, marked out by low stone walls. Those fields can pulse briefly green, in early spring; I know, because I have seen them during and after the scant rains. But by late spring the rains stop and the sun starts, and soon all is burnt umber. Or almost all; between the fields are prickly pears, agaves and monkey-puzzles, unfazed by the relentless sun, and ringing the coast are hardy savina pines. And sometimes the greenery moves. Endemic to the island, and one of its few native species, are countless small lizards, gorgeous in emerald, turquoise and jade.

Savinas and lizards and brief springtime rains notwithstanding, though, burnt umber is Formentera’s Leitmotiv. You can grow some wheat, but not much. (This is ironic, as the island’s name is thought to come from the Latin Frumentarium. But then Formentera and its larger neighbour Eivissa — Ibiza, in Castilian — are known as the illes Pityusas, or ‘islands of the snakes’, yet you will find no snakes there either.) You can tend an olive grove. You can let a few chickens and goats wander your field, and they will probably find something to keep them alive. Amazingly, you can even grow enough grapes to make a little (a very little) wine. But doing all these things was, historically, insufficient to keep the islanders’ bodies and souls together. So, after gathering what little the land could give them, the men took their boats out to sea to supplement their incomes with a maritime harvest. Their fields are dotted with the typical island fincas, simple small low whitewashed houses. Occasionally, you will see what looks like a half-house, the rear wall falling sheer from the roof-beam. A half-house is exactly what it is, and there is a terribly sad story behind it.

Read the full piece here

I believe that the greatest expression of spiritual freedom in intimate relationships does not lie in strictly sticking to any particular relationship style – whether monogamous or polyamorous – but rather in a radical openness to the dynamic unfolding of life that eludes any fixed or predetermined structure of relationships.

–Jorge N. Ferrer

a mathematical biology joke

A shepherd is tending his sheep, and a man comes by and says, "If I guess the correct number of your sheep, can I have one?"

The shepherd says, "Please try."

The man looks at the flock and says "Eighty-three."

The shepherd is completely amazed that he got the right number. The man picks up a sheep and starts to walk away.

The shepherd says, "Wait! If I guess your profession, can I have my sheep back?"

The man says, "Sure."

The shepherd says, "You must be a mathematical biologist."

The man says, "How did you know?"

"Because you picked up my dog."

via Carl Zimmer's always interesting science blog

Minicells for Delivering Cancer Drugs

The gold ring everyone in cancer chemotherapy is reaching for is the ability to selectively kill cancer cells without damaging normal ones. Easier said than done. So far, clever attempts at delivering potent drugs straight to the cancer cells using techniques such as conjugating them to antibodies specific to those cells, have been inconclusive at best. Now, a group of Australian investigators report promising results using bacterial minicells as the drug delivery system. (This research is highlighted in Nature Review: Drug Discovery.)

Several items here are of microbiological interest, the most surprising of which is that minicells can be loaded with anticancer drugs with the greatest of ease. Just place the minicells in a solution containing the drugs and presto! The minicells imbibe with such gusto that, depending on the drug, between 200,000 and 10 million molecules are stowed per minicell. No efflux takes place, so once loaded, the minicells become a stable delivery system. It seems to make no difference whether the drugs are hydrophilic (e.g., irinotecan), hydrophobic (e.g., paclitaxel and cisplatin), or amphipatic (e.g., doxorubicin, vinblastin, and 5-FU). Magic!

Of course, stopping at this point would not result in selective targeting of the drugs. Therefore, the authors coat their minicells with a bispecific antibody. One antibody arm binds to the O-antigen of the lipopolysaccharide on the minicell surface, the other to a specific surface receptor on the cancer cell. The minicells are now ready to go.

Minicells are rapidly taken up by cancer cells and broken up internally, thus delivering the drugs where intended. For a variety of human tumors, treatment with drug laden minicells destroys the tumors in vitro and also in vivo in mice carrying such tumors. The effect was much greater than with the drugs alone. Minicells also handily beat out drug-loaded liposomes. Mice, dogs, and pigs exhibited essentially no ill effects from the administration of the minicells. Impressive, indeed, and cheering. Bacterial minicells hold out significant promise for the development of tolerable anticancer therapies. And there promise to be yet other uses. Already minicells are being used as a safe delivery system for vaccines against lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus in mice.

More from Elio's Small Things Considered

Television Reviewer extraordinaire

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while know that I have a soft spot for James Wolcott, who writes principally for Vanity Fair. Among many other talents, he's now proven that he can write a superb review of a new TV show which he not only hasn't viewed, but has no intention of viewing!

Lance Mannion asks: "...anyone watch the premiere of Saving Grace last night? How naked did Holly Hunter get?"

These are questions each of us must answer in our own way.

As for me, I not only can't report on the extent of Holly Hunter's jaybird status in the premiere episode, but won't tune in to monitor her future states of undress and bedsheet splayings. Her middle-aged Lindsay Lohan hellion can drink, smoke, floss, and dance like a drunken Isadora Duncan in the moonlight under the spray of a lawn sprinkler for all I care, because I don't care, and not because I have hold the prospect of Holly Hunter's nudity in low esteem. For me the deal breaker is knowing that Hunter's Grace, "a tormented, fast-living Oklahoma City police detective," will be grappling with her demons each week under the careful coaching of a guardian angel named Earl.

Guardian angels are where I draw the line. Guardian angels and ghosts that "can't let go of life"--truly annoying.

Jay Leno used to joke that the "evil twin" plotline was the last refuge of a desperate show (he cited David Hasselhoff confronting his evil twin on Knight Rider--"You could tell it was his evil twin because he couldn't act either!"), but any show that begins with a guardian angel has already fouled the birdcage as far as I'm concerned. No contending with inner demons can survive a case of the supernatural cutes.

Wolcott's full piece can be read at his blog

An Olympic sized (cough, cough) Problem?

James Fallows, correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, is living in Beijing to report on the upcoming Chinese Olympics. He has noted the terrible pollution which inundates that huge city, and, having asked various locals how athletic competitions could possibly be held under such conditions, he received these four basic responses:

1) The air is better than it used to be.

2) It's mainly construction dust, and since the pre-Olympic building boom is nearly over, the dust will settle down by time the games begin.

3) The government will do whatever it takes -- closing factories, banning cars -- to make the air acceptable a year from now, and it is within this government's power to make that happen. Indeed a trial, temporary ban of a million-plus cars is scheduled for next month, to see how much difference it makes.

4) It's actually worse than you think, because the Beijing government allows 1,000 new cars onto the road every day -- unlike Shanghai, which strictly limits the number of new license plates it offers (and auctions them off to the highest bidders, which is another story).

Fallows' full piece

Not Your Average Travelogue

After a couple of rain-soaked days and nights in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital and on record as one of the world’s wettest cities, it was time to venture out for a quick run.

There is no green space in Monrovia, only piles of human waste and decades of accumulated debris from buildings rocked by fourteen years of civil conflict. The decline is accelerated by the pounding rainy seasons and years of neglect. Utterly evaporated is the Monrovia described in Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps: "a life so gay, with dancing and the cafés on the beach." From my lodgings in a dilapidated convent near the beach, I thought I might head in that direction. I’ve always associated coastlines with escape and was needing one now.

According to local legend, the Liberian coast was an international surfing destination in the seventies and eighties. Huge swells were visible from my dank quarters on the convent’s second floor. Today the beach is a no-go area for ordinary Liberians, as the city’s criminal elements congregate there to wait for nightfall. It also happens to be chemically toxic. Monrovia’s open sewers dump their contents directly into the coastal surf and local rivers, and passing oil freighters have been discharging their bilge inside unguarded national waters for years.

The result is a noxious coastline; the city itself is close to being the foulest urban environment I’ve ever seen or smelled. The town of Kismaayo in southern Somalia wins that title hands down: an urban coastline where goat and camel herds bleat into oblivion awaiting slaughter in the chop shops on the beach. Blood and offal drain into the wet sand where vultures congregate, shuffling around in a thick cloud of flies. Sharks navigate the shallow water where the blood stream from the abattoirs meets the sea. Hundreds of Somalis wander this rancid stretch, reaching the water only to defecate in the open surf. A real inter-species beach party.

The rest of Edward B. Rackley's interesting essay can be found at 3 Quarks Daily

More other? click here!

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